Category Archives: Customer Service

BricsCAD V19 promo pricing ends 15 December

I’ve previously explained the changes to BricsCAD pricing that came in with V19, and showed how the prices for new purchases would rise when the promotional period ends.

Upgrading now requires All-In. Problem?

One change I failed to point out, but which was mentioned by a commenter, was that for customers not already on the All-In Maintenance program, they needed to sign up for one year’s All-In in addition to paying the upgrade fee. This meant the upgrade fee was significantly greater than in previous years because customers were effectively paying for two upgrades (e.g. V18 to V19 as an upgrade, plus V19 to V20 covered by All-In).

Although this still represented good value compared with the competition and recent BricsCAD upgrades have proven to be well worth the money, there was still a ‘sticker shock’ effect associated with this double payment, and people who budgeted for upgrades based on previous pricing found themselves in a bind. There were complaints from customers and partners. For Bricsys, accustomed to being the good guys in terms of CAD pricing and licensing fairness, this was an unusual situation.

Fixing the problem

On 16 November, Bricsys responded to this feedback by introducing significantly reduced prices in this scenario, and committing to making good with those customers who already paid the higher prices. How significantly reduced? About half. To give you an idea, an upgrade of BricsCAD Pro V18 to V19 (and later to V20 thanks to All-In) is about US$425 or €400.

I don’t see much to complain about there. It’s great to see a company that actually listens to its customers and acts accordingly, even when doing so costs real money.

However, it’s important to note that this lower upgrade pricing only applies during the promotional period that had already been announced for new license pricing. That period ends on 15 December (i.e. prices go up from 16 December). To make things very plain, at the time of writing:

BricsCAD promotional pricing for both upgrades and new purchases will end in two days.

This only affects on-demand upgraders

None of the above has any effect on customers who were already on the All-In program. That program has always represented the best value way of keeping BricsCAD up to date; I recommend getting on it and staying on it. You can of course hop off it in the future if Bricsys one day fails to keep you happy with its upgrades. Although you’re effectively paying for upgrades in advance it’s still a perpetual license system, which gives you the ability to keep playing even when you stop paying.

There is also the option of the rarely-used subscription (rental) pricing for those cases where licenses are not needed long-term or need to be assigned to a specific project. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my thoughts on that licensing model. If you need it, fine. If you don’t, you shouldn’t be strong-armed into adopting it.

Perspective

Bear in mind that with all this talk of rising prices, a little perspective is useful. Based on currently-available pricing, the 3-year cost of BricsCAD Pro including All-In in the USA is $1615, compared with $4605 for AutoCAD on subscription. At the end of the 3 years, you will have a perpetual license of the then-current version of BricsCAD Pro, or you will have nothing at all if you had spent 2.85 times as much to rent AutoCAD.

If you look beyond 3 years (and some customers of mine have AutoCAD licenses ten times that age) then the difference in the value proposition between the products becomes even more dramatic. You’re all smart people with calculators and spreadsheets, so I invite you to do your own comparisons.

Reminder: if you want to get the absolute best value for money from a BricsCAD purchase, remember to do it on or before 15 December. If you do decide to buy, and also want to support this blog, then please use this link to do so:

Bricsys Store

Disclosure: this is a sponsored link. If you buy a Bricsys product using this link, I get part of the proceeds. However, this will not have any effect on the editorial content of this blog. I don’t expect to be able to retire on the proceeds from this link (if any) and I will continue to write what I honestly think about the CAD products and policies of all companies, as I see fit.

Autodesk Fusion 360 massive subscription price rise/drop

7 Replies

Autodesk’s cloud-based 3D design tool, Fusion 360, is changing price and structure from 7 October 2018. Whether it’s a huge price rise or a huge price drop depends on your perspective.

Price rise

The current annual subscription cost for Fusion 360 is US$310 and that’s going to change to US$495, which represents a 60% price increase. Existing subscribers are being kept at the same annual rate of US$310 or US$300 (depending on when you first subscribed) “for as long as you renew”. Existing subscribers, that looks like a promise to never increase your prices as long as you keep up the payments. Make sure you capture and retain all of Autodesk’s statements on this matter, in case that promise eventually gets forgotten.

However, for that amount you’ll now be getting the same features that are currently in Fusion 360 Ultimate; the lesser and greater versions are being amalgamated and just called Fusion 360.

Price drop

The current annual subscription cost for Fusion 360 Ultimate is US$1535. As that’s going to change to US$495, that represents a 68% price drop.

Is it fair?

If you currently use Fusion 360, even if you have no use for Advanced Simulation, Advanced Manufacturing or Generative Design, it’s not bad news. The only downside is that you’ll now be paying more if you need to add seats, or if you temporarily drop and resume subscription.

If you currently use Fusion 360 Ultimate, you are probably going to be overjoyed at spending a lot less in future. If you just paid US$3,070.00 for a 2-year subscription that’s about to be worth US$990, you might be less pleased. To assuage your ire, Autodesk will be giving you (and all existing annual subscribers) another 24 months subscription, gratis. Still, depending on the term length and renewal timing, some customers are going to be much luckier than others. That might annoy the less fortunate.

I think Autodesk has been very fair and reasonable with the way it has handled these changes. However, it does serve as a reminder that once you’re a subscriber, you’re at the mercy of your software company.

Explaining the four tiers of AutoCAD license

5 Replies

Yesterday’s tiers

Once upon a time, long long ago, you could buy AutoCAD with or without sets of features called Advanced Drafting Extensions (ADE) containing optional extras such as dimensioning. At one stage you could buy four tiers of AutoCAD license at different prices:

AutoCAD
AutoCAD + ADE1
AutoCAD + ADE2 (incorporating ADE1)
AutoCAD + ADE3 (incorporating ADE1 and ADE2)

(Interestingly, the above situation is similar to the current arrangement with BricsCAD, where BricsCAD Classic, Pro and Platinum are available with incrementing prices and feature sets, with BricsCAD BIM and Sheet Metal available on top of Platinum).

As almost everybody bought AutoCAD + ADE3 anyway, the ADEs were eventually absorbed into the main product and AutoCAD became just AutoCAD again. Later, the AutoCAD line would split again into AutoCAD LT, AutoCAD, and various AutoCAD-based vertical products such as AutoCAD Mechanical and Civil 3D.

Today’s tiers

Fast forward thirty-odd years and AutoCAD licenses are again available in four tiers (even if we ignore AutoCAD LT and Civil 3D). For an AutoCAD 2019 user, these are:

A perpetual license holder who allowed maintenance to lapse after activating AutoCAD 2019.
A perpetual license holder still under maintenance.
A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer prior to the release of AutoCAD 2019.
A subscription user who switched from maintenance under the Move to Subscription offer after the release of AutoCAD 2019 or who started a new full-price subscription at any time.

Note that Tier 1, etc. is my description of the category and not Autodesk’s.

What the tiers mean

This table shows what is available to customers in each of the above tiers:

Tier	Perpetual	Usage	Updates	Support	Cloud	Shared Views	Web/Mobile	Toolsets
1
2
3
4

Here’s what the table headings mean:

Perpetual – a perpetual license that allows continued use into the future without requiring further payment.
Usage – rights to use the license at home, use of previous versions and internationally.
Updates – formerly known as Service Packs, these bug fixes and minor feature enhancements are withheld from customers who are not actively paying Autodesk.
Support – the ability to log a service request that will be addressed by a technician. There are actually multiple levels depending on how much you pay: Basic, Advanced and, for subscription users, the ability to schedule a call to talk to somebody.
Cloud – online services such as storage and rendering.
Shared Views – formerly available to all AutoCAD 2017 and 2018 users, this feature was renamed, updated and made subscription-only in AutoCAD 2019.
Web/Mobile – the AutoCAD Web and AutoCAD Mobile App viewer/markup tools.
Toolsets – the ‘Only One AutoCAD’ set of AutoCAD-based verticals now called Specialized Toolsets (excluding Civil 3D). Note that if you’re a customer in Tier 3 who originally had a vertical product (e.g. AutoCAD Mechanical), you will still have access to that toolset and plain AutoCAD, but not the others.

Moving to three tiers

Felice at Autodesk has explained that Autodesk plans to move everybody in Tier 3 to Tier 4 at some point in the future (subject to legal disclaimers). But for now, if you took up the Move to Subscription offer at the wrong time, you don’t yet have access to Specialized Toolsets.

Thanks are due to Felice for patiently answering my questions to clarify the situation and explain the detail.

Autodesk subscription price rise certainty

What’s new in AutoCAD 2019 for maintenance customers?

11 Replies

So you’re a long-term customer who has used AutoCAD since it ran on an abacus. You paid for upgrades when you could and switched to maintenance (then called Subscription) when that became the only cost-effective option for keeping current. You’re not about to fall for the subscription (rental) trick; they can prise your perpetual license from your cold, dead fingers.

It’s no secret that the value for your maintenance dollar has been poor for years. Autodesk is jacking up maintenance prices in leaps and bounds; is the maintenance being performed at a rate that matches the amount being charged?

In short, is AutoCAD 2019 enough of an advance over its predecessor to make it worth the maintenance money you paid in advance for it? This post seeks to answer that question.

What you’re not getting

As a maintenance customer, you’re being denied the big item that would make the answer to that question a definite ‘yes’ – Specialized Toolsets. Despite the name and the There Can Be Only One hype, if you’re a renter you’re not getting one AutoCAD that has the extra bits available. You’re getting the availability of a bunch of seven different AutoCAD variants and one add-on (Raster Design), each of which needs to be downloaded, installed and run individually. This initiative has been unkindly referred to as ‘shovelware’, and it’s highly likely that throwing in all of these verticals for ‘free’ means that we’ve seen the end of their meaningful lives. Expect no significant future enhancements and you may avoid disappointment. However you look at it, it’s subscription-only and therefore need not concern us further.

Similarly, as a maintenance customer you’re not getting AutoCAD Web and Mobile. Despite the names, these aren’t AutoCAD. They’re simple online viewing tools with some editing and markup functionality.

What you’re getting taken away from you

You may recall me describing (and praising) the AutoCAD 2017 feature, Share Design View. This was slightly improved in AutoCAD 2018. In AutoCAD 2019 it has been revised again and renamed to Shared Views. Presumably, the Views you’re Sharing are no longer of Designs. Whatever the reason for the rename, it has a sinister connotation. Share Design View is considered obsolete and has been removed. Shared Views has been provided only to subscription customers. The upshot is that this is a feature removal. Yes, you’re getting negative value for your maintenance dollars. This is one of the more petty, vindictive attempts to convince you to go rental. Whoever put their hand up at the product meeting to suggest this particular piece of anti-customer nastiness probably got a gold star from Andrew Anagnost, but I don’t approve and I think it is likely to prove counterproductive.

Another feature that has been removed from AutoCAD in 2019 is the ability to export to FBX files. If you didn’t use this feature, you won’t care. If you used it as the basis of a Virtual Reality workflow to allow you to get your DWG 3D models into, say, Unity to create a virtual environment, then you will probably care a great deal. Similarly, FBX import has also gone. Autodesk’s suggestion that you use the DWG import and export feature in their other products instead is no use at all to you if you don’t use those products in your workflow.

Because Autodesk A360 has been deprecated, a bunch of related commands have also gone AWOL. The lesson here is to not get too used to any Autodesk cloud-based workflows; they could vanish on a whim at any moment.

What you’re getting

What’s left? What are you getting for your hard-earned? Here are some enhancements:

Some of the icons have been slightly modified. This includes the status bar icons. Unfortunately, Autodesk remains deaf to the many requests for the return of text to this area.
2D graphics performance is supposedly improved.
The Graphics Performance dialog box now has a 2D section.

OK, these are minor tweaks. Some are welcome (performance), others (icon tampering) are just tinkering that nobody will care about. How about worthwhile new functionality?

Well, there’s one feature that many will find useful: Drawing Compare. But wait! Isn’t that new? Well, no. Let’s put aside the fact that this is just playing catch-up to a core BricsCAD feature. Purely within the AutoCAD world, it’s still not new. Drawing Compare has been available as an Autodesk-supplied free app since 26 April 2012. It’s still available now for AutoCAD 2016 and later, even though the one for 2013 to 2015 has been ‘unpublished’.

I’ll examine the differences between the AutoCAD 2019 core feature, the AutoCAD add-on and the BricsCAD core feature in a future post. I can tell you that Edwin Prakaso thinks the old add-in is better than the core feature, but I’ll compare the compares for myself and you can make up your own mind.

Summary

For Autodesk giveth (a bit) and taketh away (a bit more). Overall, maintenance customers are down on the deal. Customers are paying ever-increasing amounts for tiny or even negative benefits. Why do they bother?

Has Autodesk broken your old licenses?

8 Replies

I’m seeing multiple recent complaints from people stating that their older but perfectly legal perpetual license AutoCADs are being broken. They’re also reporting that Autodesk is being less than helpful about fixing the problem in any reasonable kind of timeframe. Whether this is a deliberate act or yet another “this won’t happen again” screw-up is difficult to determine, but either way it’s pretty obnoxious. People paid a lot of money for this software and they deserve to have it working.

Original Red A figure copyright Autodesk, Inc. This derivative image was created from scratch using BricsCAD V18 and falls under fair use (commentary, criticism).

If you have an old release lying around for whatever reason, maybe you’d better check to make sure it’s not broken.

Autodesk, if you can’t get your licensing act together, I hope you’ve budgeted enough to provide full refunds to everyone with an old license. Millions of them. Thousands of dollars each. That’s quite a few billion dollars. No? Don’t have that in the piggy bank? Better get cracking, then.

To those people stuck without a working AutoCAD who need to get work done while fighting Autodesk, regular readers of this blog will be able to tell you know where to go to get 30 days’ relief. File under told you so.

Has this happened to you? Please comment and provide the details.

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 6, future proofing

2 Replies

This is the sixth and final post in this series where I explain why this statement holds true:

As a CAD Manager looking after AutoCAD users, or a power user looking after yourself, it’s worth your while to have a copy of BricsCAD handy.

This post explains why adding a copy of BricsCAD to your stable of AutoCAD licenses is a good thing for your future and that of your company.

A CAD Management thing I did a few years ago was to examine the options for replacing AutoCAD and other Autodesk products. I was an AutoCAD loyalist (albeit a somewhat critical one) with over a quarter of a century invested in it. I was looking after the deeply entrenched and very heavily customised CAD environment of a major public utility company that had been using AutoCAD as its primary CAD system since the late 1980s. Hundreds of custom commands were in place and providing priceless productivity benefits. Hundreds of thousands of DWG files were on file, with thousands more coming through every month. The inertia behind AutoCAD was very, very strong. Looking outside the cage was a pretty radical step to take. What led me to that point?

Autodesk business policy. Autodesk has become increasingly anti-customer over the years in ways that will be familiar to all readers of this blog. I won’t rehash them here. This leads to…
Increasing costs. Autodesk software is expensive and getting more so. Autodesk has made no secret of its intention to move to an all-subscription (rental) model. This is an attempt to treble the ongoing income Autodesk receives, in return for doing as little as possible. Which leads to…
Lack of progress. It had become clear that the days of AutoCAD seriously improving from release to release were over, never to return. This isn’t because there is no room for improvement, it’s because Autodesk doesn’t want to improve AutoCAD. AutoCAD won’t be permitted to become too capable because that would just eat into sales of Autodesk’s other products. You’re not going to see 3D parametrics or sheet metal capabilities in AutoCAD: buy Inventor instead. You’re not going to see BIM capability: buy Revit. Beyond the internal competition issue, some years ago, Autodesk leadership lost interest in what it perceived to be an old-fashioned dead-end product. The income from AutoCAD customers is being diverted to fund purchase and/or development of more fashionable and interesting products.
Frustration with Autodesk’s Beta program. The goings-on within the Autodesk Beta program must remain private, so what I can say here is limited. I can say that I spent many years contributing large numbers of hours to that program in order to attempt to improve the product. As time went on, the positive results that emerged from that effort decreased; that much is no secret because it is apparent in the product. I felt I was fighting against Autodesk to try to improve the product, and losing. There were a few final incidents that persuaded me to stop bashing my head against that particular wall. I wasn’t the only one. I stuck it out for years longer than many very valuable people who had already given up before me.
Proxy server issues. Over the years, Autodesk’s habit of attempting to do sneaky things to access the Internet had caused a variety of problems in a secure proxy server environment. This caused several things not to work, and harmed performance severely in some places. As Autodesk’s developers turned over, things that worked in one release would not work in the next. Attempts to get this addressed as a support issue would result in the environment being blamed. These problems increased over the years as Autodesk threw in more and more connectivity-requiring features. There was a non-zero and ever-increasing possibility that one day, Autodesk would screw things up altogether and leave us with non-functioning software. That has already happened for some people, and although the stoppage has generally been temporary, it is important to have redundancy.
Poor performance. AutoCAD has been getting bigger and slower. Downloads are huge and Autodesk does its best to make them as difficult as possible. Installations take an age, as do uninstallations. Startup times are terrible and getting worse. My users were complaining – a lot – and there wasn’t much I could do about it.

That’s what moved me to take a very, very serious look at alternatives. Your motives may differ. Just the desire to have a Plan B in case of disaster might be enough.

If you don’t feel moved to investigate, you may eventually be faced with no option. Sooner or later, the person who holds the purse strings at your company may point to this year’s much bigger Autodesk invoice and ask, “What are we getting for this? How can we reduce our costs?” When that happens, you don’t want to be scrabbling round for answers before that invoice needs to be paid. Look into the options in advance. Are you really wedded to AutoCAD or are you actually tied to DWG?

Days of Future Past

Here’s my suggestion. Examine the available alternatives to AutoCAD and the other Autodesk products you use. Do it sooner rather than later so you get the chance to determine the answers to non-trivial questions like these:

Capability. Does the alternative product do everything that AutoCAD does, that your users need it to do? Does it do other stuff that AutoCAD doesn’t that you might find useful? What’s the performance like? How does it work on the hardware you have? Does it have user interface elements that don’t just look good but work productively in practice?
Compatibility. You will almost certainly demand extremely good DWG compatibility, but this question goes well beyond that. Will your LISP work? How about DCL? ActiveX support? DOSLib? Other programming languages? Can you carry over your customisation files? Can you make the interface look the same? If you have custom toolbars, or ribbon, or even image menus, do they carry across? Can your users carry across their skills without downtime, extensive training and a productivity hit? Can AutoCAD and the potential replacement coexist without issues? Can you use a common set of custom support files pointed at by both products? Will it work well on your hardware?
Add-ons. If you’re using third party products on top of AutoCAD, or if you’re using an AutoCAD-based vertical, is that product or an equivalent available? Does it work well? What do the objects they create look like in plain AutoCAD? Can you round-trip through AutoCAD and back and retain your intelligence? You’re probably going to have to test this with evaluation software and your own data.
Licensing options. Is perpetual licensing available? Can you stick on a release for a few years and still purchase upgrades later? Has the company committed to providing you with licensing options or has it made noises about going all-rental? Is network licensing available? Does it coexist problem-free with Autodesk’s network licensing software?
Costs. Compare the likely costs for all your options over several years. You’re going to have to make some assumptions. It can be difficult to work out what they should be.
Track record. Has the company been around for a while? What reputation does it have? Does it treat its customers with respect? How good is the support?
Future prospects. Is the company likely to be around long-term? Is it actively developing the product you’re interested in? Is it innovating? Is it merely following AutoCAD at a distance or charging ahead? Is the product going to be limited by Autodesk-like internal competition?

I went through all of these questions and settled on BricsCAD as the best option in my company’s case. In fact, several aspects made it really the only viable option. The product impressed me with high performance, capabilities well beyond AutoCAD in several important areas, a very high degree of compatibility (particularly LISP but also other customisation files), the availability of perpetual licensing and much lower ongoing costs. The company impressed me with its honesty and attitude toward customers.

Most of all, I was won over because I could see that the product had a future. Subsequent improvements have only strengthened that view.

Obviously, you need to make your own judgement based on your own circumstances. I would suggest looking at all the options, including sticking with AutoCAD permanently, with or without subscription or maintenance. Maybe you can use my investigations as a starting point, but I encourage you to start investigating now rather than when you’re under time pressure and don’t have time to do a thorough job.

It will cost you a few minutes to download and install of an evaluation BricsCAD and start preparing for the possibility of a different future. Maybe it won’t turn out to be part of your company’s future, but it could still be part of your future.

Options are good. Learning is good. Best case scenario, your knowledge is going to save your company money and improve its productivity, and you will end up smelling of roses. Worst case scenario, you’re going to spend some very justifiable time doing something new, different and interesting. I recommend it.

Other posts in the Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD series:

Part 1, fixing drawings
Part 2, 3D operations
Part 3, parts on demand
Part 4, efficiency
Part 5, LISP

Having trouble authorising Autodesk products?

2 Replies

You’re not alone. At the time of writing, the Autodesk license service at auth.autodesk.com is down, so if you need a response from that service before your software will work you’re likely to be severely out of luck.

That’s more likely to be inconvenient if you’re on subscription rather than a perpetual license, because Autodesk subscription software phones home every month. Yes, even if you have a 3-year license.

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

6 Replies

Following the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster, where subscription users found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken by an Autodesk licensing system meltdown, Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost issued an apology. He also assured customers on Twitter that it wouldn’t happen again:

While I welcomed that, I did have this to say at the time:

I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

Back to the present. Does it come as a surprise to anybody to discover that less than a month later, Autodesk has again accidentally remotely killswitched people’s licenses? Again, not just the new release, but 2018 too. As reported on Twitter and www.asti.com:

After a couple of exchanges, the always-responsive people on the @AutodeskHelp Twitter feed came back with this:

So it’s fixed, but CAD Managers now have a bunch of work to do at their end to deal with a problem created at the Autodesk end. Somebody screwed up, they fixed it, another apology is issued, stuff happens, life goes on. That’s it for this month, probably. But it doesn’t address a very fundamental problem.

Let’s go back to basics.

The primary function of a licensing system is to allow use of the product by legitimate users.

Everything else is secondary. If a system relies on phoning home and getting the required response from a remote system before you’re permitted to use the software you paid for, not just after installation but on an ongoing basis, then it’s fundamentally flawed from the user’s point of view. Yet that is the system that Autodesk has chosen to base its business on.

No amount of sincere, deeply felt apologies or it’ll-never-happen-again promises will alter the fact that Autodesk has put its own convenience ahead of the ability of paying customers to use what they have paid for. Will Autodesk change that state of affairs? I very much doubt it, in which case it’s inevitable that this kind of thing will happen again, whatever anyone might promise.

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

10 Replies

Is anybody left who still thinks BricsCAD isn’t a serious replacement for AutoCAD? If that’s you, perhaps the latest news might make you take it seriously. No, not the Heidi Hewett news. Even more recent news than that!

Robert Green, CAD Management guru, Cadalyst writer and consultant (not to mention a rather good guitarist) has been announced as the first Bricsys Certified Migration Consultant.

Image courtesy of Bricsys

Read all about what Robert has to say on this Bricsys blog post.

Anybody who has been reading this blog for the last few years will be surprised by none of what Robert has to say in that blog post. It’s not merely a repeat of what I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s all factually correct and easily verifiable by any competent CAD Manager.

I’ve been there and done that. I’ve gone through the process of taking a very complex custom AutoCAD environment, applying it to BricsCAD and giving it to my users. They loved it. No training was required to work as usual. Most things happened quicker, more conveniently, or both, starting right from the speedy installation. Once the product is in place and established, training can then be applied to take advantage of the places where BricsCAD is ahead of AutoCAD.

If you’re a CAD Manager where AutoCAD is used and you haven’t checked out BricsCAD yet, it’s about time you did.

This might come as a shock to those who see Autodesk domination of DWG CAD as a permanent fact of life, but the game has changed. AutoCAD’s stagnation and comments by senior figures show that the former flagship is clearly unloved by the powers within Autodesk. AutoCAD LT, even more so. An unimpressive AutoCAD 2019 shows that major improvements can no longer be expected in exchange for your ever-increasing annual payments, and with large numbers of people having been offloaded from the research and development teams, who would do it anyway? Meanwhile, BricsCAD development shoots ahead.

Thanks to decades of hostility towards customers that has only accelerated in recent years, Autodesk can’t even rely on customer loyalty for survival. When there’s a serious competitor that offers an easy migration path, the inertia that has kept Autodesk alive so far in the DWG space is no longer enough. The feeling among industry observers I meet is that Autodesk is in a decline of its own making. The only debate is whether that decline is temporary or terminal.

Back to Robert et al. Autodesk has lost many good people, and Bricsys is gaining them. The momentum is clearly with the Belgian company. Anybody want to run bets on who the next big name defector will be?

Autodesk removes ability to control products and updates by device

1 Reply

If you’re a CAD Manager controlling Autodesk software through Autodesk Account, make sure you don’t ignore this little notice near the top:

Full details can be found on the page Device Management Discontinued in Autodesk Account, but in short another level of control and flexibility will be removed from you in a month or so.

I hope you’re sincerely grateful for Autodesk improving and simplifying the user management experience.

This only applies if you allow Autodesk desktop app to be installed, which I’ve always advised against. Of course, if you’re in a secure proxy environment there’s a good chance that Autodesk desktop app doesn’t work anyway, so the point is moot.

Autodesk forums return – what do you think?

11 Replies

Congratulations to the tech team behind the Autodesk forum software for getting the redesigned forums back up well ahead of schedule!

The new forums look very different. My first impression is that it is a standard-issue Autodesk “progression” – it looks prettier but doesn’t work nearly as well. Huge swathes of screen space are wasted for graphic impact (no, I don’t mean the long-dead Autodesk attempt at PowerPoint). Big fonts, huge header, even bigger footer, lots of pretty white space. Yet what is there contains less useful information. On a 1920 x 1200 monitor, I can only see four threads within a forum before I need to start scrolling:

What I can’t see is if there have been any new posts since my last visit. To do that, I have to enter each thread and do a lot of scrolling (again, because of the highly inefficient information-to-screen-space ratio) to get to the end, then try to remember whether or not I had already read the last few posts. I can’t even just hit [End] because that gives me this:

How efficient is that? Signal to noise ratio: 0%. Compared with the old forum where I could see the headers for a whole bunch of threads and scan the number-of-new-posts column in a second or so, I now have many minutes of clicking, scrolling and frustration ahead of me. Like I have nothing better to do. Every click counts, remember.

Typical Autodesk. Marketing appeal over user efficiency, every time. All sizzle, no steak.

What do you think? Have your say here, on the Community Feedback forum, and/or even on dear Autodesk.

What to do while the forums are down, dear Autodesk?

3 Replies

In common with most online services, the Autodesk forums are down for maintenance from time to time. That will be happening this weekend:

Announcement: The forums will be unavailable starting 1 p.m. on Friday, April 6 (Pacific time) while we implement the forum redesign. We will be back online at 9 a.m. on Monday, April 9, or sooner.

I really wish Autodesk would act like a company with an international focus and use universally understood time standards for its announcements. Allow me to translate for those people outside North America for whom “Pacific time” means nothing.

Pacific Time (UTC-7)	UTC
Off line: 1 PM, 6 April	8 PM (20:00), 6 April
On line (latest): 9 AM, 9 April	4 PM (16:00), 9 April

So, what to do if you have something you want to say when the forums are down? R.K. McSwain has already made some suggestions: CADTutor, AUGI and The Swamp. I have one further suggestion:

dear Autodesk

This new forum is an experiment of mine, aimed at providing a place where people can provide feedback to Autodesk with minimal restrictions. I made an attempt at setting up dear Autodesk nearly a decade ago but the technology (Pligg) I used was not up to handling the vast amount of spam and hacker attempts it attracted, so I closed it in early 2009.

Now I’m trying again using a different format and different technology (a conventional MyBB forum).

Disclaimers:

The site is, of course, not owned or operated by Autodesk, a fact which is made clear on the site in several places
This experiment might also fail, for the same or different reasons
The technology I’m using is new to me and it might break due to my lack of experience with it or reasons beyond my control
A couple of days ago, attempts to register were generating database errors; this appears to be fixed now, but it may recur
There is no guarantee that Autodesk people will read the forums (although some did last time)
There is no guarantee that Autodesk will act on any of the feedback, suggestions or wishes made on the site (or anywhere else)

Last time I tried this, I didn’t let on that I was behind it. This may have been a mistake, but I did this because I didn’t want the site to be seen as mine. The idea was to allow a community to develop which could freely express itself, not one which was led or prompted by any individual, myself included.

This time I’m doing things differently in several ways, and one of those ways is to be completely transparent about who’s behind it. I still don’t want it to be “my site”, though. I’d like it to be a community’s home. If you are interested in trying to help form that community, please register on the site. The front page has instructions.

If you run into trouble registering or using the site and can’t communicate that via the site itself, feel free to let me know here.

Right now, the site is a blank canvas. Paint away.

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

4 Replies

I reported in January that, “The way Autodesk Collection licensing works, you can’t use more than two of the products in a Collection at once.”

Thanks to a policy reversal from Autodesk, this is no longer true. Felice on the Autodesk forums shared the good news:

Hi all, I have an update to share on this topic… we are removing the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limitation. Here are some more details/background:

Overview:
Currently, the Industry Collection concurrent usage policy limits the number of collection products that can be used at the same time to two. The terms and conditions related to Industry Collection concurrent title access stated:

2.1.1 Notwithstanding anything to the contrary contained in the applicable Autodesk License and Services Agreement relating to any Industry Collection software program Benefit, the maximum number of Concurrent Access Titles that You or Your Named User may Access concurrently shall not exceed two (2) Concurrent Access Titles, at any one time.

Effective immediately we are removing this restriction and allowing customers to use as many products concurrently within the collection as they need to support their workflows.

Why we have removed this restriction:
The Industry Collections continue to evolve and are increasingly focused on the support of multi-product workflows. The restrictive nature of the concurrent usage policy does not support this progression.

The Autodesk Knowledge Network page on this has been updated accordingly:

This also applies for license borrowing, but only for 2019 products and later.

While this restriction should never have existed in the first place, it’s good to see it gone now.

Moving when prodded is alive at Autodesk.

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

5 Replies

Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost has sent an email to customers affected by the AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster that acted as a remote kill-switch for users of earlier releases of subscription software. The email’s subject is We Missed the Mark:

Image credit: R.K. McSwain

Readers of this blog will be aware that Andrew and I have fundamental disagreements on where he has taken the company, but credit where credit is due. An apology was appropriate in this case, and Andrew stepped up and made one.

He has also stated on Twitter that it won’t happen again. I don’t think such a guarantee is realistic, given that the nature of subscription software is to only work when it knows you’ve paid up. At least it demonstrates that the desire is there right at the top to try to prevent such debacles from occurring in future.

Autodesk watchers know that words mean little and actions are everything. I look forward to Andrew sharing news of the actions he’ll be taking to make good on his promise.

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

10 Replies

If you’re an AutoCAD user, you may have been intrigued by the news about the new way Autodesk is bundling up AutoCAD 2019 with various verticals (perpetual license owners need not apply). This is Autodesk’s latest attempt to promote its subscription model and raise prices again. 7% this time, but much more to come. But never mind that, the main point is that you’re getting a whole lot of stuff, and who could say that’s not a good thing?

So it’s most unfortunate for Autodesk that the AutoCAD 2019 rollout has been an unmitigated disaster.

My own experiences in trying to download the product were sub-optimal, but I later learned that I was one of the lucky ones. Subscription users not only had problems with AutoCAD 2019, they found their AutoCAD 2018s were broken too, victims of an Autodesk licensing system meltdown. That’s right, the AutoCAD 2019 launch acted as a remote kill-switch for people’s production software.

Perpetual license users were fine, of course. Only subscription customers suffered. There’s a lesson there that should not go unnoticed.

Back to my own experiences, to begin with I couldn’t download AutoCAD 2019 anywhere, despite it being having been announced everywhere some hours earlier. Autodesk Account wasn’t showing 2019, but it was showing this:

The usual workaround method of downloading the free trial wasn’t any better; that was still on 2018. I even tried installing the execrable Autodesk desktop app (temporarily!), but there was no sign of AutoCAD 2019 there either.

I’ve never had any success using Autodesk’s AVA bot for any real questions, but there was a time when it served as a gateway to Akamai-free downloads, so I tried that. Unfortunately, AVA has been “improved” and that once-excellent feature is gone. I did try asking AVA for the download link to AutoCAD 2019, but that didn’t go well.

First attempt:

Second attempt:

I mentioned my difficulties on Twitter and a few hours later the long-suffering but always-professional @AutodeskHelp people offered this:

Despite appearances, this actually turned out to be helpful because by then the product trial download had been fixed and was offering 2019 rather than 2018. I still didn’t see a direct link and against my better judgement tolerated a very temporary installation of Autodesk’s nasty Akamai download manager. About 5 minutes into the download it said it was going to take about 9 hours so I went away and left it. I returned within the hour to find it was finished, so I have no idea how long it actually took. After immediately uninstalling all traces of Akamai and Autodesk desktop app, I was able to start my evaluation.

So how’s the product? Pretty much the same as 2018, except with a better drawing compare tool. Oh, and the icons are better. The first command I ran in the new release reminded me that some things never change. The ancient rectangular pickbox bug popped in to see me, just like an old friend.

I’ve been warmed by the familiar, comforting experience of this and various other early 90s-era bugs and limitations, where the easiest workaround is to use a competitor’s product to do those bits. More on that in a future post.

An hour or so into using the product saw it crash and burn for the first time:

Don’t take my word for it, though; here are some comments from various users, CAD Managers and long-term Autodesk fans, most of whom had a worse time of it than I did. It’s not just AutoCAD; LT and Navisworks are definitely affected and there may be others. Comments here have been reproduced from various sources under fair use; names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I think it is safe to say that Autodesk are having a very bad day. Account and activation issues, subscription access issues, forum login issues, kudos and comments blocked to some users…

I installed the brand new @Navisworks Manage 2019 last night, and this morning I get the “Your trial has expired” !!!

I can safely say that ‘unimpressed’ is my status right now with the licencing idiocy going on. Not only can I not get the 2019 version, but my 2018 version has stopped working too.

Looks like all subscription (not maintenance or legacy) software is affected this way: logging in and out as well as workarounds posted are not working. Now this is a good reason to abandon Autodesk subscription model.

Good news: Autodesk began rollout of 2019 licenses! Bad news: It might break your 2018 licenses.

Hard to imagine this rollout going any worse.
[Autodesk]”Hold my beer….”

2.5 days without AutoCAD available. I just wish Autodesk would have told us so I could have gone on vacation. Instead, I will have to work thru the weekend to make up lost time.

I love Autodesk and their software, but they have just ditched an entire generation of Autodesk ‘rockstars’ and their subscription portal isn’t working. It really doesn’t look good, does it?

my 2018 is hosed on 3 devices

Unfortunately the situation has lasted for nearly 24 hours and no work done. Can we send the bill to Autodesk?

so I thought I’d try and activate LT
LOL

Although some parts of this are supposedly fixed, it’s not over yet. As I type this, people are still reporting problems and Autodesk is still offering apologies:

Even now, AVA is still completely in the dark about the current release of Autodesk’s traditional flagship product.

It’s great to see users helping each other, though. You may find this Autodesk Forum post by Travis Nave useful as an interim workaround. Also, in a marvellous continuation of McNeel’s free service to the AutoCAD (and BricsCAD) LISP community, DOSLib has been made available for AutoCAD 2019 even before many people were even able to get hold of the software it runs on. That’s what I call service!

All in all, this has not the best start to AutoCAD’s brave new world of oneness. How did it go for you?

How to get your Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working in Windows 10

67 Replies

I’ve been setting up a new PC at home and one of the things I struggled with was getting my Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working. This isn’t a CAD tablet (remember those?); instead, I use its pressure-sensitive stylus for image creation and editing. Press harder and you get more ink. Turn the pen over and you automatically erase instead of drawing. Press the eraser harder and you get more erasing.

I use PaintShop Pro for my image work, by the way, not Photoshop. You can still buy and optionally upgrade PaintShop Pro perpetual licenses, which is how it should be. You’re probably aware that I don’t rent stuff unless there’s no realistic alternative.

According to the Wacom FAQ, I was severely out of luck.

What is the latest driver for the Graphire 3 & 4 (CTE) tablets?
The Graphire 3 & 4 CTE tablets made from 2003-2007 are no longer supported by Wacom and will not work with a current tablet driver. Below are links to the latest drivers available for these tablets.

Windows 8, Windows 7, Vista & XP Download Here
Mac 10.8, 10.7 & 10.6 Download Here

Not one to give up so easily, I tried a variety of drivers for my tablet (model CTE-440). They were either blocked from installation by Windows 10×64, or in the best case scenario failed to provide any functionality other than acting as a basic mouse. The tablet failed to appear as a WinTab device, so I couldn’t configure PaintShop Pro to use its pressure-sensitivity, defeating the object of having the thing in the first place.

So I did what I thought was best and put the tablet out on the verge with the other junk awaiting council collection and investigated a replacement. Not from Wacom, obviously! I don’t want to reward a company for abandoning its products. I was checking out Huion tablets, which are so much cheaper than Wacom’s that it’s probably worth taking a punt and buying one anyway.

But then the stubborn streak in me (have you noticed?) kicked back in and I had one last go. A bit more in-depth Googling led me to this page. This is an old, non-maintained, leftover page from Wacom Europe. Let’s hope it stays there. On that page I found the driver I needed: DRIVER 5.30-3 RC FOR WINDOWS 8, WINDOWS 7, VISTA, AND XP. The direct link to the driver installation executable (cons530-3_int.exe) is:

http://downloadeu.wacom.com/pub/WINDOWS/cons530-3_int.exe

I retrieved my tablet from the junk pile, installed that driver, cleaned off my tablet while my system rebooted, plugged it in and away I went! In PaintShop Pro 2018, the setting is found at File > Preferences > General Program Preferences in the Miscellaneous section.

Wacom’s FAQ gave me a bum steer. Yes, the driver I used isn’t supported in Windows 10 and it isn’t current, but I don’t care. It works just fine and means my perfectly good as-new tablet isn’t landfill. Wacom needs to do better both in terms of supporting its hardware with current drivers and providing more useful information to its customers.

Autodesk contemplates Bentley-style licensing

2 Replies

Some of you may have received an invitation from Autodesk to provide survey feedback. This hints at a possible move towards time based licensing (e.g. hourly), and asks what kind of tools you will need to handle that. Sometimes these questions lead to nothing, other times they are a precursor to inevitable change (desirable or not). If it’s the latter, I can only surmise that Autodesk is concerned that its customers haven’t been thoroughly peed off by anything new in a while and is investigating novel and interesting ways to annoy them.

Ask a Bentley customer what annoys them most about dealing with the company and odds are you’ll be told that it’s the time-based licensing system introduced to SELECT customers a few years ago. Tales abound of rip-off calculations, huge unexpected end-of-period bills, companies being billed for impossible numbers of hours, and so on. Some customers even went as far as calling the system a scam or a fraud.

Some of the worst excesses of SELECT are apparently now fixed, but this system is still unpopular with many customers. So I guess it’s only natural for Autodesk to examine moving in that direction.

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates – again!

5 Replies

BricsCAD V18.2 for Windows is out. The new stuff in this mid-term update is again showing up Autodesk’s lack of progress with its once-flagship product, AutoCAD. I’m sure Autodesk would love customers to accept that there’s only so much anyone can do with a DWG-based CAD product once it reaches a certain level of maturity. Customers should get used to nothing of significance being added year after year. Diminishing returns, and all that. Pay to continue using the product, but don’t expect it to get better.

What a shame for Autodesk, then, that Bricsys exists. By consistently providing a raft of significant improvements with each full and mid-term release, Bricsys shows up that idea as nonsense. It’s perfectly possible to keep improving CAD at a very rapid rate, particularly if you’re not worried about competing with other products in your range. There’s a reason AutoCAD’s parametrics are restricted to 2D, and BricsCAD’s 3D parametrics in a DWG product proves that the reason isn’t technical. It’s strategic. Also strategic is cutting the guts out of an already much-weakened AutoCAD team, because you would really prefer your customers to be using your trendier and/or more expensive products.

I should point out that BricsCAD V18 customers who have a perpetual license, even without maintenance, will be receiving V18.2 with all its improvements free of charge. Contrast that with Autodesk, which is, despicably, withholding even bug fixes from selected customers. Autodesk’s attitude to customers who aren’t constantly paying up front is one of utter contempt. Autodesk feels entitled to your money; Bricsys wants to earn it.

So what’s Bricsys done to earn your money with BricsCAD V18.2?

Mostly, it’s lots of relatively small-sounding things that add up to significant productivity enhancements. There are several items that are playing catch-up to AutoCAD, such as long-overdue in-place text editing. There are big performance improvements in drawings with PDF underlays due to a smart multi-resolution cache mechanism. The 3D-to-2D generation mechanism has also been significantly sped up. Constraints (2D and 3D, unlike AutoCAD) are easier to create. Several 3D direct modeling operations have been made easier. That also helps with sheet metal design, which has seen other improvements.

In Bricsys BIM V18.2, a lot of smarts have been added. The mechanism for converting CAD models (including those made in BricsCAD Shape) to BIM models, BIMIFY, already did some fascinatingly clever things, but that’s been improved further particularly in the areas of structural member and room recognition. For those of us in Australia, support for our steel sections is very welcome.

For me, that’s not the big news. Oh, no. The big news for me is a thing called BLADE – the BricsCAD LISP Advanced Development Environment.

If you’re a CAD Manager or in-house developer and you’ve been waiting until BricsCAD had VLIDE, wait no longer. But this isn’t just catch-up. This is a big leapfrog over Autodesk’s sadly neglected IDE for CAD’s primary user programming language. There’s so much good stuff in BLADE that I can’t hope to do it justice here, so I will be covering it extensively in future posts. For now, here’s a statement for you:

If you program in AutoLISP or Visual LISP, you should be doing it in BLADE.

It’s that good. Really. Watch this space for details.

The download is small, the install is fast, it won’t harm your AutoCAD installation, and you can evaluate it free for 30 days. Links:

How to sign your LISP files

cad nauseam

Mostly AutoCAD, BricsCAD and related subjects

Category Archives: Customer Service

BricsCAD V19 promo pricing ends 15 December

Upgrading now requires All-In. Problem?

Fixing the problem

This only affects on-demand upgraders

Perspective

Bricsys Store

Autodesk Fusion 360 massive subscription price rise/drop

Price rise

Price drop

Is it fair?

Explaining the four tiers of AutoCAD license

Yesterday’s tiers

Today’s tiers

What the tiers mean

Moving to three tiers

Autodesk subscription price rise certainty

What’s new in AutoCAD 2019 for maintenance customers?

What you’re not getting

What you’re getting taken away from you

What you’re getting

Summary

Has Autodesk broken your old licenses?

Why every AutoCAD CAD Manager should have a copy of BricsCAD – part 6, future proofing

Having trouble authorising Autodesk products?

Autodesk remotely killswitches AutoCAD licenses – again

The game has changed – Robert Green migrates to BricsCAD

Autodesk removes ability to control products and updates by device

Autodesk forums return – what do you think?

What to do while the forums are down, dear Autodesk?

dear Autodesk

The great Autodesk Collections rip-off has ended

Andrew Anagnost apology for AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

AutoCAD 2019 rollout disaster

How to get your Wacom Graphire 4 tablet working in Windows 10

Autodesk contemplates Bentley-style licensing

Bricsys shows Autodesk how to do mid-term updates – again!

How to sign your LISP files